TGFs produce high-energy electrons and positrons. Moving near the speed of light, these particles travel into space along Earth's magnetic field. High Energy Electrons in yellow, positrons in green- click to enlarge

Scientists using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected beams of antimatter produced above thunderstorms on Earth, a phenomenon never seen before.

Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF), a brief burst produced inside thunderstorms and shown to be associated with lightning. It is estimated that about 500 TGFs occur daily worldwide, but most go undetected.

“These signals are the first direct evidence that thunderstorms make antimatter particle beams,” said Michael Briggs, a member of Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). He presented the findings Monday, during a news briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

Fermi is designed to monitor gamma rays, the highest energy form of light. When antimatter striking Fermi collides with a particle of normal matter, both particles immediately are annihilated and transformed into gamma rays. The GBM has detected gamma rays with energies of 511,000 electron volts, a signal indicating an electron has met its antimatter counterpart, a positron.

Although Fermi’s GBM is designed to observe high-energy events in the universe, it’s also providing valuable insights into this strange phenomenon. The GBM constantly monitors the entire celestial sky above and the Earth below. The GBM team has identified 130 TGFs since Fermi’s launch in 2008.

“In orbit for less than three years, the Fermi mission has proven to be an amazing tool to probe the universe. Now we learn that it can discover mysteries much, much closer to home,” said Ilana Harrus, Fermi program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor detected 130 TGFs from August 2008 to the end of 2010. Thanks to instrument tweaks, the team has been able to improve the detection rate to several TGFs per week. Credit: NASA

The spacecraft was located immediately above a thunderstorm for most of the observed TGFs, but in four cases, storms were far from Fermi. In addition, lightning-generated radio signals detected by a global monitoring network indicated the only lightning at the time was hundreds or more miles away. During one TGF, which occurred on Dec. 14, 2009, Fermi was located over Egypt. But the active storm was in Zambia, some 2,800 miles to the south. The distant storm was below Fermi’s horizon, so any gamma rays it produced could not have been detected.

“Even though Fermi couldn’t see the storm, the spacecraft nevertheless was magnetically connected to it,” said Joseph Dwyer at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Fla. “The TGF produced high-speed electrons and positrons, which then rode up Earth’s magnetic field to strike the spacecraft.”

The beam continued past Fermi, reached a location, known as a mirror point, where its motion was reversed, and then hit the spacecraft a second time just 23 milliseconds later. Each time, positrons in the beam collided with electrons in the spacecraft. The particles annihilated each other, emitting gamma rays detected by Fermi’s GBM.

On Dec. 14, 2009, while NASA’s Fermi flew over Egypt, the spacecraft intercepted a particle beam from a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF) that occurred over its horizon. Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor detected the signal of positrons annihilating on the spacecraft — not once, but twice. After passing Fermi, some of the particles reflected off of a magnetic “mirror” point and returned. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Scientists long have suspected TGFs arise from the strong electric fields near the tops of thunderstorms. Under the right conditions, they say, the field becomes strong enough that it drives an upward avalanche of electrons. Reaching speeds nearly as fast as light, the high-energy electrons give off gamma rays when they’re deflected by air molecules. Normally, these gamma rays are detected as a TGF.

But the cascading electrons produce so many gamma rays that they blast electrons and positrons clear out of the atmosphere. This happens when the gamma-ray energy transforms into a pair of particles: an electron and a positron. It’s these particles that reach Fermi’s orbit.

A TGF produces gamma rays (magenta) as well as high-energy electrons (yellow) and positrons (green). This simulation tracks a TGF and its particle beams from their origin altitude of 9.3 miles (15 km) to 373 miles (600 km), beyond Fermi’s orbit. Credit: Joe Dwyer/Florida Inst. of Technology

The detection of positrons shows many high-energy particles are being ejected from the atmosphere. In fact, scientists now think that all TGFs emit electron/positron beams. A paper on the findings has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters.

“The Fermi results put us a step closer to understanding how TGFs work,” said Steven Cummer at Duke University. “We still have to figure out what is special about these storms and the precise role lightning plays in the process.”

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership. It is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

The GBM Instrument Operations Center is located at the National Space Science Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala. The team includes a collaboration of scientists from UAH, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany and other institutions.

And of course, all of this energy presumably comes from the collision of liquid and ice particles in clouds. When EU Theorists propose that the Sun can be powered externally, critics produce back-of-the-envelope electrostatic energy calculations meant to prove it cannot be (even though electrostatics are not especially useful in plasma physics).
But, when their failure to account for lightning’s power source is mentioned, it is a problem which never threatens the ideology that lightning comes from the collision of liquid and ice particles in clouds.
And nevermind lightning to space. From http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060322sprite.htm
“They realized that every time there was a sprite above the clouds there was a bolt of positive lightning below the clouds. The sprite and the positive bolt were parts of a single discharge that stretched from space to the Earth’s surface.”
And nevermind lightning on Venus …
“Perhaps the storms don’t generate the lightning but the lightning generates the storms. Venus, after all, has extensive lightning, more powerful lightning than on Earth, and it has an atmosphere of smog: Lightning in smog contradicts the thunderstorm theory of lightning generation. ”
And nevermind lightning bolts at the centers of dust devils, which have been filmed etching scribbles into the Martian surface.
The conventional view of lightning is an Earth-centric view of lightning that is bound to fail. These enigmas are not annoying obstacles to our efforts to prove our pre-existing views of the universe. They are critical clues which are begging us to re-examine cause and effect.

Does that mean that research on thunderstorms is credible but research on other aspects of weather is not credible? Or is it only research for which people don’t like to face up to findings that is not credible.
(How many people here know what anti-matter is? How many they think this finding might have an effect on the source of energy they use, or how hot or cold they get?)

Wow, wonder if it’s also part of those ‘sprites’ out of the top of thunder storms they’ve noticed a couple of years back. Very interesting.
How long before the eco-nuts start using this as the new ‘threat or bad consequences of global warming’. Given the level of fairly tales that they’ve come up with for their money swindle, er-CAGW altar, this should be interesting.

Matter and antimatter are created from energy ( γ → e− + e+) on a regular basis in nuclear decay. This blurb from Wikipedia describes the common phenomenon of “pair production” which is alluded to in the article above. Not all isotopes produce pairs, but many do.
“In nuclear physics, this occurs when a high-energy photon interacts in the vicinity of a nucleus. The energy of this (mass-less) photon has can be converted into mass through Einstein’s famous equation E=mc² where E is energy, m is mass and c is the speed of light. Thus if the energy of the photon is high enough so that it can make the mass of an electron plus the mass of a positron (basically twice the mass of an electron which is 9.11 x 10 ^-31kg) then an electron-position pair may be created…..Photon-nucleus pair production can only occur if the photons have an energy exceeding twice the rest energy (mec2) of an electron (1.022 MeV)…”
In other words 511 keV x 2 as mentioned in the press release.

Not said very loudly in this unclassified press release is that the gamma rays it is continuously monitoring (“waiting to detect” might be a better phrase) are “expected” to be coming from earth-bound nuclear weapon explosions.
Also, the satellite may be able to detect the atmospheric impacts of small comets and meteors by their radiation.

Anthony,
Good posting! This is extraordinarily important news (and it makes a change that it is actual news from Nasa rather than various re-inventions of the wheel to keep their funding base).
The important thing I would say, rather than Terrestrial Gamma Flashes (TGFs), is more potential insight into the mechanisms of thunderstorms and tornadoes themselves which are frankly not well understood despite all the handwaving textbook explanations.
It might be worth mentioning, what needs to be a standard cautionary note: This phenomena (in this case TGFs) is nothing to do with CO2 although I daresay such ascribing is on the way.
Piers Corbyn astrophysicist, ARCS, FRAS, FRMetS;
MD WeatherAction.com long range weather & Climate forecasters

While I think of it – check out Star Trek at CERN by all means (heaps of fun) but press the home button for an additional antimatter explanation to that of Wikipedia. Again, heaps of fun.
Cheers
Robert

Given the energy in lightning, I always suspected x-rays could be made. The idea is not new at all. It goes back a lot longer than most people realize.
“Lightning appears to be nature’s own particle accelerator after all. In the 1920s, Nobel prize-winner C. T. R. Wilson suggested that lightning could produce electrons traveling at the speed of light.” See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=x-rays-abound-when-lightn.
If you have relativistic electrons, antimatter isn’t much more of a leap. Very cool that NASA was able to demonstrate the process does occur.

“Thunderstorms Proven to Create Anti-matter”
That’s interesting, because thunderstorms are known to equally mysteriously produce lightning as well. And one of the explanations for lightning is that an electrostatic charge builds up between water droplets and ice crystals, although it is acknowledged that there is not nearly enough power to generate lightning electrostatically. And not only that, lightning discharges tend to happen very rapidly in succession – in other words, there is hardly time for the next charge to build up.
If an efield is building up in the cloudtops and accelerating electrons to relativistic speeds, and an efield is also building up between clouds and cloud-to-ground, this begs the question “Where is the electric current going to or coming from?”
“Effectively the discharges extend to space. And from there beyond to the magnetosphere, which then begs the question ‘Where is this electric current going to or coming from?’ and the answer is it’s coming from the solar circuit.”
“All planets have this connection to the solar circuit, which means that they are accepting electrical charge from the sun. It was imagined initially that these strange lightnings above storms were coming from the storm below. But the evidence is all in favor of the fact that the electrical energy is already sitting up there in the ionosphere waiting to get to earth. And it just comes down through those various elves, gnomes, the sprites – all of these whimsical names given to things that are not understood. Now once the charge gets to the thundercloud,
the electricity is distributed in the thundercloud, and then it is discharged to the ground through the normal lightning bolts. Or through tornadoes. Tornadoes are a slow electric vortex.”
~Wal Thornhill
interview

This sort of “real” science is a good illustration of why it is so important that we do NOTHING about CO2 or the boogie-man AGW at this time. I have no doubt that if AGW were in fact to be a problem, technology will be available for us to adapt or correct the problem by the time it really became a problem. Ever more reason to quit wasting valuable resources on AGW B.S. and futile CO2 mitigation/sequestration/CapN’Tax schemes, and instead, divert our attention to things like this, and fusion, and other such “viable” technologies.
AWESOME post Anthony! — Thanks Much!

Zeke the Sneak says: “…one of the explanations for lightning is that an electrostatic charge builds up between water droplets and ice crystals, although it is acknowledged that there is not nearly enough power to generate lightning electrostatically. And not only that, lightning discharges tend to happen very rapidly in succession – in other words, there is hardly time for the next charge to build up…”
I once saw a satellite video of a thunderstorm in Texas. It looked like drops falling into a puddle, except that each crater was a single lightning discharge. Moreover, there seemed to be connectivity–the discharges appeared related. I’ve looked for the video on the ‘net several times. It was definitely worth watching, but I never found it.

Energy in all forms is, quite literally, the stuff of life… right down to the micro-nano scale.
It creates, it destroys, it keeps it all going.
Not compound molecules (ie: CO2 *cough cough*)… just plain ol’ energy transfer.

Being on the ground underneath a 60,000 ft. anvil cloud is humbling. Love when it is dark as the hobbes of hell at 3:30p.m. on a hot prairie afternoon. This article is about the photo at the top of Anthony’s webpage, is it not?

Interesting stuff. The very high intensity shown in the map is not surprising in far Northern Australia since from August to Dec we get the Wet season from about the middle to the end of that period with ferocious thunderstorms.

This is no big deal. I’ve created positrons many times in the past using only words. The trick is to take a negatron (laymen call them ‘electrons’) and give it some positive verbal feedback. Something like, “Don’t worry that they won’t let you into the nucleus. It’s because you’re better than them.” Or just simply say, “Negatron, you’re awesome.”
Their minds aren’t that complex, so it’s easy to give them a positive attitude. And charge.
😉

As previously reported here, the Crab Nebula is producing powerful gamma ray flares generated by “…super-charged electrons of up to 1015 electron volts, or 10 quadrillion electron volts, approximately 1,000 times more energetic than the protons accelerated by the Large Hadron Collider in Europe…”
Now it’s revealed that earthly thunderstorms can produce streams of electrons that are so energetic they can also yield powerful gamma ray flashes, which themselves are strong enough to generate electron-positron pairs.
So what’s the point of building ever-more-powerful particle accelerators on Earth? What is there left to learn from smashing particles here on the ground? Wouldn’t a better use of research funds be to place advanced detectors in orbit, and see what such natural sources of high-energy particles and radiation end up doing?
Since the current “most important thing to discover with a particle accelerator” is the theorized Higgs boson, basically why CERN’s LHC was built, I Googled about it. Found this report. Fermilab’s Tevatron, the only competitor to the LHC in terms of power thus ability to discover a Higgs boson, will be shut down in 2011, there will be no extension as was hoped. Guess others are wondering about how useful these accelerators are too.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the freed-up funding will be diverted to a possible satellite project. Fermilab is run by the US Department of Energy, which will need all the funding it can beg, borrow, or steal to continue to combat Climate Change™ while leading the charge in reducing emissions of the deadly pollutant CO2 by helping us transition to Clean Green™ renewable energy sources.
Yup, good to know the DOE and this administration has their priorities straight. Science as it’s needed, and not a second earlier!

Keep in mind that the CO2 alarm is based on the Stefan-Boltzmann law and average surface temperatures, which likewise say that the planet can’t emit in the visible spectrum, much less in the UV, much less emit gamma rays and anti-matter. This doesn’t alarm me because my laptop screen also wildly violates Stefan-Boltzmann, which is good because otherwise it would probably burn the flesh off my fingers.
The land/ocean difference is interesting, because it reminds me of my gut suspicion that the South-Atlantic Anomaly where the Van Allen Belt touches the atmosphere (and which irradiates satellites and astronauts whenever they pass through it) is perhaps an important factor in the atmosphere’s electrical circuit. Would changing the size of the anomally (and thus the resistance) change cloud patterns, thunderstorm activity? If so, wouldn’t that affect albedo, precipitation patterns, water vapor distribution and intensity, the greenhouse effect due to water vapor, surface winds, and countless other things? Since the anomally is a result in a slight asymmetry in the Van Allen Belt due to the slight off-centering of the Earth’s magnetic field, wouldn’t it be affected by the way that field wanders around over long time scales? Likewise, wouldn’t the location of the anomally slowly move across land and ocean? Wouldn’t this be a way that climate might link to the periodic wanderings of the magnetic field, with further input from solar cycles which charge the Van Allen Belts?
So far as I know, these questions haven’t even been asked, much less answered, but then again, they are wildly speculative and based on not much of anything except gut feeling.
However, gamma ray and anti-matter burts are probably why the Enterprise can’t use the transporters on every third or fourth episode.

sailing off the coast of southern mexico one night about 25 years ago we were chased by a thunderstorm like I’ve never seen since. It formed up at sunset and had an opening underneath where forked lightning raced out under the cloud layer. Every minute or so a single, thick, very long-lasting, solid bolt of lightning came out of the hole to strike the water directly below. It was so unlike normal lightning that I called it the “finger of god” because I was certain it would smote us if it hit the boat. It certainly put the fear of god into us. The bolt striking the sea was not forked. It was simply a solid line of electricity extending vertically to the water from the opening under the thundercloud. After chasig us for an hour the storm passed a mile astern and marched out to sea. The description of “positive” lightning connected with sprites brought this to mind.

In the Equatorial regions there is close ‘relationship’ between ionosphere and thunderstorms. Ionosphere can provide all the charges and electric currents, no great deal there. This relationship is far more profound for climatic changes than for few grains of ‘anti-mater’. See part relating to the equatorial storms with images 4,5 and 6 in:http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC20.htm

On the larger scale the energy radiated out is probably peanuts but still, it is yet another way earths heat gets radiated to space. Another brick in the wall missing in the models, begs once more the question if there is actually a wall of sound science behind the models.

George Turner says:
January 10, 2011 at 11:45 pm
Keep in mind that the CO2 alarm is based on the Stefan-Boltzmann law and average surface temperatures, which likewise say that the planet can’t emit in the visible spectrum, much less in the UV, much less emit gamma rays and anti-matter. This doesn’t alarm me because my laptop screen also wildly violates Stefan-Boltzmann, which is good because otherwise it would probably burn the flesh off my fingers.
Can you elaborate on the last sentence above please George?
Many thanks

I just don’t buy this.
What is the mean free path of a positron in the upper atmosphere? And what magnetic field strength is required to deflect (or even reflect) a highly energetic positron?
Nah. (But I have neen known to be wrong before!)

Piers said
“It might be worth mentioning, what needs to be a standard cautionary note: This phenomena (in this case TGFs) is nothing to do with CO2 although I daresay such ascribing is on the way.”
I read once that if Co2 ‘particles’ can acquire enough speed they can be ejected out of the atmosphere.
No one has ever been able to tell me what that speed was and how much- if
any- Co2 gets pushed into space.
If we are saying that Thunderstorms are a ‘gun’ are they also a mechanism for ejecting Co2 into space-if so how much?
tonyb

A couple of years ago I was flying in my trike ( microlight/ultralight ) under a large storm cloud. It wasn’t raining and I was only about 10 minutes away from my strip doing about 60 mph about 800 feet above the ground.
I was hit by lightening which maxed out my radio and GPS , the screens just went black. The radio was separated from the wiring loom by a battery but the GPS wasn’t.
Now everybody tells me that this isn’t possible because of the need for earthing but I can assure you it happened to me. Now how did that energy get into my nav/com setup I wonder? Not that I think it was anti-matter by the way. 🙂
Other than that Anthony this is a fascinating article about a phenomenon ( lightening ) that we know almost nothing about other than we shouldn’t play golf whilst it’s around.

…From http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060322sprite.htm – “They realized that every time there was a sprite above the clouds there was a bolt of positive lightning below the clouds. The sprite and the positive bolt were parts of a single discharge that stretched from space to the Earth’s surface”…

Bill DiPuccio says: January 10, 2011 at 6:33 pm

…511 keV x 2 as mentioned in the press release.

Piers Corbyn says: January 10, 2011 at 6:52 pm

…This is extraordinarily important news…

Hoser says: January 10, 2011 at 7:30 pm

Given the energy in lightning, I always suspected x-rays could be made…

Zeke the Sneak says: January 10, 2011 at 7:46 pm

“Thunderstorms Proven to Create Anti-matter”. That’s interesting, because thunderstorms are known to equally mysteriously produce lightning as well. And one of the explanations for lightning is that an electrostatic charge builds up between water droplets and ice crystals, although it is acknowledged that there is not nearly enough power to generate lightning electrostatically. And not only that, lightning discharges tend to happen very rapidly in succession – in other words, there is hardly time for the next charge to build up…

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says: January 10, 2011 at 11:35 pm

As previously reported here, the Crab Nebula is producing powerful gamma ray flares generated by “…super-charged electrons… approximately 1,000 times more energetic than the protons accelerated by the Large Hadron Collider in Europe…”

vukcevic says: January 11, 2011 at 1:22 am

In the Equatorial regions there is close ‘relationship’ between ionosphere and thunderstorms… This relationship is far more profound for climatic changes than for few grains of ‘anti-mater’… See images 4,5 and 6: http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC20.htm

Already a crop of telling comments, and some fascinating pics from Vukcevik. I’ve only recently looked as closely at the Electric Universe hypothesis as is needed to start to hold opinions that are both scientifically informed from the EU perspective and aware of EU debunkers. So far I see it fitting like the legendary Cinderella’s Shoe. I have looked briefly, and shall attend to Leif’s references properly, in time, but right now I do not anticipate much more there than the EU equivalent of Abrahams or John Cook or Gavin Schmidt.
Though the EU hypothesis is the one supported by mavericks, eccentrics, skeptics and cranks, it bodes well as a very natural way of making sense of the universe in the farther reaches and beyond our familiar atmosphere. It is worth repeating that electrical power is 36 orders of magnitude greater than the power of gravity (IIRC), and that whereas with gravity and electrostatic charges, the force decreases with the SQUARE of distance, with magnetism, the force decreases in LINEAR correspondence with distance. Therefore, at mega-distances, its power starts to outstrip that of gravity.

Keith Battye says:
January 11, 2011 at 4:47 am
“Now everybody tells me that this isn’t possible because of the need for earthing but I can assure you it happened to me. Now how did that energy get into my nav/com setup I wonder? Not that I think it was anti-matter by the way. :-)”
“Everybody”, whoever that really is, is a moron. Aircraft are generally protected from lightning by 1) avoiding it and 2) having a metal skin and a few extra bits to help the lightening take a path that avoids fuel tanks and sensitive electronics. Recreational aircraft seldom have metal skins and obviously you didn’t avoid the storm.http://www.lightningtech.com/d~ta/faq1.html

From Science Daily…http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091111142518.htm
‘………………………..Thanks to a serendipitous discovery by Tel Aviv University’s Prof. Colin Price, head of TAU’s Department of Geophysics and Planetary Science, and his graduate student Yuval Reuveni, science now has a more definitive and reliable tool for measuring the Sun’s rotation when Sunspots aren’t visible — and even when they are. The research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research — Space Physics, could have important implications for understanding the interactions between the Sun and Earth. Best of all, it’s based on observations of common, garden-variety lightning strikes here on Earth.
Waxing and waning, every 27 days
Using Very Low Frequency (VLF) wire antennas that resemble clotheslines, Prof. Price and his team monitored distant lightning strikes from a field station in Israel’s Negev Desert. Observing lightning signals from Africa, they noticed a strange phenomenon in the lightning strike data — a phenomenon that slowly appeared and disappeared every 27 days, the length of a single full rotation of the Sun.
“Even though Africa is thousands of miles from Israel, lightning signals there bounce off Earth’s ionosphere — the envelope surrounding Earth — as they move from Africa to Israel,” Prof. Price explains. “We noticed that this bouncing was modulated by the Sun, changing throughout its 27-day cycle. The variability of the lightning activity occurring in sync with the Sun’s rotation suggested that the Sun somehow regulates the lightning pattern.”
He describes it as akin to hearing music or voices from across a lake: depending on the humidity, temperature and wind, sometimes they’re crystal clear and sometimes they’re inaudible. He discovered a similar anomaly in the lightning data due to the changes in Earth’s ionosphere — signals waxed and waned on a 27-day cycle. Prof. Price was able to show that this variability in the data was not due to changes in the lightning activity itself, but to changes in Earth’s ionosphere, suspiciously in tandem with the Sun’s rotation.
Taking the pulse of the Sun
The discovery describes a phenomenon not clearly understood by scientists. Prof. Price, an acclaimed climate change scientist, believes it may help scientists formulate new questions about the Sun’s effect on our climate. “This is such a basic parameter and not much is known about it,” says Prof. Price. “We know that Earth rotates once every 24 hours, and the moon once every 27.3 days. But we haven’t been able to precisely measure the rotation rate of the Sun, which is a ball of gas rather than a solid object; 27 days is only an approximation. Our findings provide a more accurate way of knowing the real rotation rate, and how it changes over time,” he says.
Prof. Price cannot yet say how this finding will impact life on Earth. “It’s an interesting field to explore,” he says, “because nothing has been done to investigate the links between changing weather patterns and the rotation of the Sun.
“Short-term changes in solar activity can also impact satellite performance, navigational accuracy, the health of astronauts, and even electrical power grid failures here on Earth. Many scientists claim that the Sun’s variability is linked to changes in climate and weather patterns, so the small changes we observed every 27 days could also be related to small variations in weather patterns.
“Our data may help researchers examine short-term connections between weather, climate, and Sun cycles. With this tool, we now have a good system for measuring the pulse of the Sun.”………………………………………………’
Perhaps this is relevant to the discussion…the rotation of the sun driving occurences of lightning in Africa which is being measured in Israel. What do y’all think of that????

It might be worth mentioning, what needs to be a standard cautionary note: This phenomena (in this case TGFs) is nothing to do with CO2 although I daresay such ascribing is on the way.

I will quibble (very slightly) with Piers by asserting that TGF and CO2 are both are examples of electromagnetic energy (photons) interacting with ordinary matter.
In the case of CO2, we all know (by now) that CO2 molecules absorb energy from impinging infra-red photons. (What happens after that is a matter of great debate).
TGF involves an analogous interaction: gamma ray photons (instead of IR) interact with atoms (instead of molecules) absorbing and re-emitting enormous amounts of energy (millions of electron volts) compared to the remarkably low IR energies (on the order of a few electron volts).
Depending on the energy of the gamma ray several types of absorption/emission (“scattering”) occur. Low energy xray/gamma rays scatter elastically, with no loss of energy (“photoelectric effect”). Higher energies are inelastic and transfer energy to the atoms (“Compton effect”) . At the highest energies an amazing interaction occurs, the production of an electron-positron pair, virtually out of thin air!
Pair production is a well-know phenomenon, first predicted by Dirac in 1928 and first observed by Anderson in 1932 (while watching cosmic rays in a cloud chamber). It has even been observed in counter-propagating laser beams:http://iopscience.iop.org/0741-3335/51/8/085008
What’s interesting here is Prof. Joe Dwyer’s research at Florida Tech into the causes of lightning. His team was the first to verify x-ray production in lightning in 2004. Joe is a kind of modern-day Ben Franklin. But instead of flying kites with metal strings, he does it more safely by shooting wires attached to rockets into the clouds, thus generating man-made bolts, from which he has successfully imaged high energy x-rays in the bolts. He is trying to find the cause of lightning in terms of fundamental physics. He thinks ultimately lightning is linked to cosmic rays.

Slightly off topic but about this penchant for the misuse of “this begs the question” when what is actually meant is “this raises the question” see: http://begthequestion.info/ for some great info as well as t-shirts and mugs (I kid you not).
To beg the question is to commit a logical fallacy. Raising a question comes from the consideration of a particular event or data set.
Awesome post though and very “electrical” apparently.
– cheers

Lucy Skywalker says:
January 11, 2011 at 5:56 amThough the EU hypothesis is the one supported by mavericks, eccentrics, skeptics and cranks,….
All together with Dante Alighieri and his “Fedeli D’Amore” (Those faithful to Love, or lovers of love) who taught that Love: attraction, repulsion of opposites charges, not forgetting the neutral force separating them, rules the universe.
Beautiful…isn’t it?

Lucy Skywalker says:
January 11, 2011 at 5:56 am
………….
Most of the events I consider and write about are well within bounds of the classic electro – magnetic theory and do not require any additional elements of the EU hypothesis.

@Keith Battye: there doesn’t need to be a conductive path between the lightning strike and your gear. The lighting strike creates a huge magnetic field as it conducts many amps of current between clouds and ground. This varying magnetic field can induce currents in any nearby conductors. That’s probably what got your gear.
I’ve had lightning near misses wipe out ports on networking switches, simply due to the connected wiring acting as antennas.

@ Keith Battye
Anyone telling someone that lightning doesn’t hit planes is full of it. Lightning hits planes all the time – big or small. As for the effects on the vehicles, it’s quite random. When I was still fixing avionics for small aircraft, we had a plane come in for repairs after a lightning strike. The bolt came in through the leading edge of the prop, through the engine, right through the firewall, down the aisle and into the floor before exiting through an antenna. We had to replace the antenna. Other than that, the only damage besides scorching was the exploded bottle of Coke that had be laying in the aisle. All passengers and electronics were unharmed. So I’ve seen firsthand how freaky lightning can be.

Can’t believe it!One of the most important greenhouse gases is Ozone. The ozone in the lower atmosphere is “bad” ozone since it traps heat emitted from the earth, enhancing the greenhouse effect. The ozone in the upper atmopshere is “good” ozone, since it blocks out the harmful UV radiation from the sun. One of the main precursors for ozone formation in the lower atmosphere is NOx (nitrogen oxides), and lightning is one of the major natural sources of NOx. http://www.tau.ac.il/~colin/research/research.html

Re: “The land/ocean difference is interesting, because it reminds me of my gut suspicion that the South-Atlantic Anomaly where the Van Allen Belt touches the atmosphere (and which irradiates satellites and astronauts whenever they pass through it) is perhaps an important factor in the atmosphere’s electrical circuit
…
So far as I know, these questions haven’t even been asked, much less answered, but then again, they are wildly speculative and based on not much of anything except gut feeling.”
It’s not wildly speculative, and your gut instinct is really quite trustworthy (if you ask me). It’s the plasma universe view that thunderstorms behave as a sort leaky capacitor between space and Erth, and that the Van Allen radiation belts play an important role in this process.
Within the plasma universe view, planets, stars and even galaxies share a common homopolar motor (aka Faraday motor) morphology and function. However, we don’t see all of the individual parts of the discharge for every cosmic object: The Faraday disc is very easy to see in galaxies, but only shows up in certain spectra for stars and planets. I believe the Sun’s disc is visible in infrared (?), and this doughnut around the Sun is what ultimately stakes the sunspots down (more-or-less) to the Sun’s equatorial region.
My understanding is that, within this alternative view, the elemental makeup (and perhaps other contributing factors?) of each cosmic object has an effect upon the types of visible discharges which result from electrical discharging between cosmic bodies and their surroundings. On Mars, for instance, the electrical activity tends to take the form of gigantic dust devils. Although NASA has yet to make a big deal of it, if you zoom into one of those global Martian dust storms, you can see that the dust storms are in fact highly filamentary. So, it would appear that on Mars, the electrical discharge between the planet and space exhibits different characteristics than on Earth: It manifests as millions of side-by-side tornadoes which reach heights of about five miles high. From http://www.rense.com/general63/elel.htm
“Since Mars has no thunderstorms to “charge-up its ionosphere,” it should present a good case study of the Electric Universe. The electrical model predicts that the Martian ionosphere is indeed charged, and it posits no isolated dynamo to “separate charge.” On Mars, electrical effects will reach directly from the ionosphere to the surface without the ameliorating leakage via storm clouds that we see on Earth. Unlike radiant energy from the Sun, electrical energy can accumulate in the “planetary capacitor” for some time, with a potential for planet-altering events when the atmosphere finally “breaks down” and massive discharge activity is initiated.”
(BTW, notice the technique: they are applying laboratory plasma physics principles to our observations of cosmic objects. But, it only works if you understand laboratory plasma physics. Electrostatics will not help here. This is electrodynamics, no different than electric circuit theory.)
In fact, were one to drop all ideologies with regards to the Sun and Mars, these armies of Martian dust devils are very easy to confuse with the Sun’s spicules.
And this is one small example for why people tend to say that the EU model is simpler than the conventional theories: Conventional theorists put so much effort into breaking the universe into little, tiny labeled pieces which lack much in the way of commonality in how they operate.
EU Theory, on the other hand, demonstrates commonality for all cosmic objects and phenomena by presenting an electrical plasma cosmic framework which can naturally explain each component, based upon laboratory plasma physics fundamentals and a familiarity with the characteristics of the various cosmic objects.
It is a very clever approach. The conventional theories end up looking very Earth-centric, by comparison. Conventional theorists have not had a whole lot of success in explaining weather patterns on other planets in the solar system, so this is definitely taking it up a notch. It turns out that this approach can be used to explain all of the enigmatic planetary polar hotspots, enigmatic circulation patterns on the gas giants, and so on.
A person could literally spend a month straight digesting all of the various implications of this idea on the thunderbolts.info TPOD’s. It can be an exhilarating experience to learn this alternative view, as there are many aha-moments involved.

Re: “It is worth repeating that electrical power is 36 orders of magnitude greater than the power of gravity (IIRC), and that whereas with gravity and electrostatic charges, the force decreases with the SQUARE of distance, with magnetism, the force decreases in LINEAR correspondence with distance. Therefore, at mega-distances, its power starts to outstrip that of gravity.”
And not only that, but Birkeland Current filaments exhibit both long-range attraction and short-range repulsion with one another. This long-range attraction is the result of the electric force. What this means in practice is that filaments tend to twist around one another without actually combining (there are more technical explanations for this which involve double layers, btw … I’m summarizing …).
In other words, in the plasma universe view, the electric force is infinite in range. And this naturally supports the view that the universe is infinite in time and space, as we see a physical process which is completely self-sustaining and recursive for generating charge and organizing that charge in such a manner that the electric force is extended throughout the entire universe. The total picture does not reveal itself until you understand all of the individual key concepts, which all play an important role:
Marklund Convection
Birkeland Currents
Double Layers
Critical Ionization Velocity
Z-pinch
Glow discharge
and in some regards, the Van der Waals force
Anthony Peratt’s textbook on astrophysical plasmas lays down a solid foundation for how to construct a plasma universe using laboratory plasma physics fundamentals.

Perhaps this is relevant to the discussion…the rotation of the sun driving occurences of lightning in Africa which is being measured in Israel. What do y’all think of that????

I think my reading of your comment was going fine, sounds like some stuff I’ve read before, until I got to this point:

Prof. Price, an acclaimed climate change scientist…

Then I nearly choked, then read more carefully.
1. What’s being affected is the reception of the VLF signals generated by the lightning. As has always been the case with receiving through-air radio transmissions, signal quality and strength varies due to atmospheric conditions. Changes in Earth’s ionosphere are specifically mentioned.
2. Professor Price is saying this suggests a connection to the Sun due to the 27 day period of the pattern, which is the same as the Sun’s rotational period.
3. This talk about a 27 day Solar rotation period is somewhat laughable (the currently-popular term among the “educated elite” being “risible“). On the surface, the Sun rotates faster at the equator, has a higher angular velocity, than found moving towards the poles. The “27 days” is also problematic. From the provided Wikipedia link:

At the equator the solar rotation period is 24.47 days. This is called the sidereal rotation period, and should not be confused with the synodic rotation period of 26.24 days, which is the time for a fixed feature on the Sun to rotate to the same apparent position as viewed from Earth. The synodic period is longer because the Sun must rotate for a sidereal period plus an extra amount due to the orbital motion of the Earth around the Sun. Note that astrophysical literature does not typically use the equatorial rotation period, but instead often uses the definition of a Carrington rotation: a synodic rotation period of 27.2753 days (or a sidereal period of 25.38 days). This chosen period roughly corresponds to rotation at a latitude of 26 deg, which is consistent with the typical latitude of sunspots and corresponding periodic solar activity.

Thus the particular period mentioned would be a Carrington rotation, 27.2753 days.
The Lunar month, the period of a rotation of the Moon, can have several different values depending on the frame of reference. The ones in the range examined run from 27.2 to 27.55 days. The anomalistic month, based on when the Moon is closest to Earth (perigee to perigee) is longest with an average of 27.55455 days.
I wish there was a more precise value given for the observed period of variance in the VLF signal reception. As things stand, the Moon looks like a far more likely source of the variance than the Sun.

Very powerful electric fields oubreak.
What happens when free electrons and ions are subjected to an electric field?
Electrons are accelerated in one direction and ions are accelerated in the opposite direction.
An intense electric field can accelerate charged particles to velocities which cause gamma rays.
Plasma consists of free electrons and ions which can recombine to from neutral atoms.
More investigation and evidence needs to be gathered regarding the presense of antimatter.
What Science does know is that this process is an interaction of electric fields and magnetic fields (electric current causes magnetic fields) and charged particles, which is an expression of the Fundamental Force of Electromagnetism.
Thus, an investigation applying an electromagnetic framework of analysis & interpretation is warranted.
Also, the evidence suggests the presense of an electric circuit between the ground and the ionosphere (ionosphere consists of free electrons and ions). Additional investigation into the possible structure and processes is needed to illuminate whether such a circuit exists.
Insights gained from the application of Circuit Theory to plasma experiments in the laboratory can be compared & contrasted to the in situ data gathered.
And, if such an electromagnetic circuit does exist; what are the properties & dynamics of this circuit? What phenomenon result from the geo-physical dynamics involved.
High resolution observations & measurements of these electric fields, magnetic fields and charged particle flows will reveal these electromagnetic interactions.
It is well known from laboratory plasma experiments that electric fields will accelerate charged particles resulting in gamma ray emissions.
Explanation of physical phenomenon should first exhaust application of the known laws of physics before resorting to “new” physics.

Chris Reeve says:
January 10, 2011 at 6:08 pm“They realized that every time there was a sprite above the clouds there was a bolt of positive lightning below the clouds. The sprite and the positive bolt were parts of a single discharge that stretched from space to the Earth’s surface.”
Nearly there Chris! I think that we get a simultaneous strike up from ground and down from ionosphere with opposite charge – where they meet is a large explosion which fuses hydrogen and produces the observed particles.

@kadaka
> This talk about a 27 day Solar rotation period is somewhat laughable …
That’s what they said about Relativity, back in 1905. Before totally dismissing this theory unseen, you should at least read the paper’s abstract:

Lightning is the major source of VLF radiation in the atmosphere. From long term measurements of natural VLF radiation, we have discovered that at frequencies close to the Earth-ionosphere cutoff frequency (~2 KHz), the VLF “noise” shows a clear 27-day periodicity. Furthermore, the 27-day modulation is detected only during daylight hours, implying that this is not the lightning activity itself that is changing, but rather the waveguide parameters, that are sensitive to changing solar radiation. Although this 27-day period is quite fundamental to our Sun, it is only partially observable via the typical solar parameters such as sun spot number, Lyman alpha radiation and 10.7cm radio flux. We propose that continuous monitoring of broadband VLF radio noise may provide a new method for monitoring changes in the solar rotation rate.

So, the correlation to solar rotation strengthens the hypothesis, because it’s observed only at daytime (when the Moon is not necessarily visible). It really doesn’t make any difference that the Sun rotates at different speeds. A substantial part does rotate at the 27-day rate, so the effect may be constrained to that part of the process.
It is also well known that this atmospheric VLF waveguide is sensitive to external EMR radiation. Gamma ray bursts, for example, modulate the parameters and cause characteristic shifts in propagation.
A waveguide is a kind of filter, which has a minimum cutoff frequency, in this case the cutoff frequency of the VLF waveguide is about 2khz (which causes the characteristic musical “tweeks” in VLF receivers tuned to that frequency band).http://home.pon.net/785/natural.htm
It is easy to calculate the height of the waveguide (i.e. height of the ionosphere) from the cutoff frequency. The sun strongly affects the ionospheric layers, so it would not be surprising to find more subtle solar signatures embedded in these signals.
So what exactly is the mechanism between rotation and cutoff freq?
Who knows, that’s what PhD Candidate Reuveni and his adviser Dr. Price are trying to figure out. The results should be interesting, even if the rotational hypothesis doesn’t hold up. That’s the nature of science.

James F. Evans says:
January 11, 2011 at 10:52 amAlso, the evidence suggests the presense of an electric circuit between the ground and the ionosphere (ionosphere consists of free electrons and ions). Additional investigation into the possible structure and processes is needed to illuminate whether such a circuit exists.
Mission Instruments has a Field Mill which is used to determine the likelihood of a lightning strike. According to their site, “On a clear day, when the atmosphere is clear of storm clouds, the primary source of electric charge creating an electric field on the surface of the earth is the ionosphere. This can be thought of as a large dome-shaped electrode high above the earth, which produces positive charges which contrast to the relatively negatively charged earth. This scenario creates what is termed a “fair weather” electric field due to the positive charge overhead. When this “fair” field is measured by the EFS 1001 field mill, it can be seen to produce an output of from 50 to about 200 Volts per meter (“V/m”). This value varies, depending upon conditions in the atmosphere, and is also altered by “local effects”. Such effects are caused by anything which can carry electrical charge, including but not limited to atmospheric space charge…” (my italics)
The military has determined that electric fields above 2000 V/m indicate the greatest lightning threat. You must see the graph at the bottom to see how rapidly a storm cloud oscillates between fair and foul weather efields. It’s incredible!http://www.missioninstruments.com/pages/learning/elec_fields.html
So there possibly is a capacitance effect where charge builds up in the ionosphere and when it grows too great there is a breakdown. Wal Thornhill calls the earth’s atmosphere “a self-repairing leaky capacitor.” Another “plate” in the set-up is the magnetosphere. The earth is adjusting constantly to its electrical environment in space.

Just a thought; I wonder if all this adds anything to our understanding of the Catatumbo lightning over the Lago de Maracaibo (or Maracaibo Lake) in Venezuela?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatumbo_lightning
According to the article in the link above the lightning flashes there usually continue for many hours every day of the year and have done for centuries but last year there was a period of several months without any lightning “apparently due to a drought, raising fears that it may have been extinguished permanently.”
If that drought was due to global warming or climate disruption (or whatever it is called on Tuesdays) then that is one more thing for the world to worry about!

@kadaka
> This talk about a 27 day Solar rotation period is somewhat laughable …
That’s what they said about Relativity, back in 1905. Before totally dismissing this theory unseen, you should at least read the paper’s abstract:

Vuk
Whatever your EU belief (or mine for that matter) I loved your pics of the plasma bands on parallel tracks to the geomagnetic equator. The curious thing is that they do not quite correspond to the areas of maximum concentration of storms monitored here by the gamma-ray space telescope. Nearly but not quite. Piques my curiosity. Any ideas?Anthony
great article, yet again, a deep thank you.

jorgekafkazar says:
January 10, 2011 at 8:33 pmI once saw a satellite video of a thunderstorm in Texas. It looked like drops falling into a puddle, except that each crater was a single lightning discharge. Moreover, there seemed to be connectivity–the discharges appeared related. I’ve looked for the video on the ‘net several times. It was definitely worth watching, but I never found it.
If you ever locate that, can you link it up at tallbloke’s site? Clouds and atmospheric events are always welcome over there! ty

Fascinating post. Pair creation implies gamma ray energies above 1 Mev, which means that the electrons producing the gammas must be more energetic still, suggesting potential differences of several million volts. What happens when a downwards lightning bolt strikes the earth? Presumably there is also gamma ray production and pair creation. I always thought that the anti-matter explanation of ball lightning was fanciful, but this could go some way towards reinstating it.

Lucy Skywalker says:
January 11, 2011 at 12:55 pmNearly but not quite. Any ideas?
Gamma ray satellite fault, of course. Joking apart, I do agree with your comment, I was uncertain about post, but eventually thought it was worth it. As long as there is more to it than just coincidence, I am happy about the supposition.
Not certain, I suspect it could bedue to variations in the intensity of the equatorial electrojet (EEJ), also the ionospheric inner ring currents are a progresively weaker.

… how about electron bursts with energy up to 100 Mev?
Joe Dwyer, the Florida Tech researcher mentioned in Andrew’s article and my first post above, has just published an APS article “Chance of Thunder—and Gamma-Ray Flashes” which summarizes some of these recent gamma ray findings (with a link to yet another TGF paper: “Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes as Powerful Particle Accelerators”)http://physics.aps.org/articles/v4/1

“”””” Roger Longstaff says:
January 11, 2011 at 8:27 am
“Even though Africa is thousands of miles from Israel”
Eh ???
Bugger, should have stayed awake in geography classes. “””””
Psssstt….Hey Mate, I said GO SOUTH from the Gaza Strip; not North; up there it’s all ice and snow; bloody awful place up north of the Gaza; but it’s all gonna melt soon. And don’t sweat it Mate; Moses was a really lousy navigator too; found the only dry hole in the whole middle East. South buddy; got that ??

My 1st design as a graduate Electrical Eng in 1975 was a 5 channel VLF receiver for Doppler tracking of an automated weather station mounted on an ice flow moving in the Beaufort Sea. I had known about and observed the diurnal effects at sunrise and sunset. Since VLF propagates well via the ionosphere while reflecting some of the signal back to earth, the overall path changes quickly. As I recall the shift was around 10Km in a few minutes time. It only shifted twice a day, forward then back and seemed to correlate with the location of sunset where I , the receiver was located and not the transmitter. and then stable during the rest of the day to within 10e-11. … I used high Q crystal filters to reduce noise BW to 100 Hz. I knew it was also good at picking up earth and inter-cloud lightning pulse noise but knew it wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up all the storms around the globe but certainly within thousands of miles.

Roy says:
January 11, 2011 at 12:18 pmJust a thought; I wonder if all this adds anything to our understanding of the Catatumbo lightning over the Lago de Marcaibo (or Maracaibo Lake) in Venezuela?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatumbo_lightning
According to the article in the link above the lightning flashes there usually continue for many hours every day of the year and have done for centuries but last year there was a period of several months without any lightning “apparently due to a drought, raising fears that it may have been extinguished permanently.”
If that drought was due to global warming or climate disruption (or whatever it is called on Tuesdays) then tha is one more thing for the world to worry about!
I looked into this a short while back, and found the explanation for the lightning disappearing was that it was not the season for it..
What that article has cleverly done is to put two ideas together out of context from which ‘is read’ the idea as you have it, and as I had the first time I read it, that the lightening is a year round phenomenon and this ‘drought from January to April 2010’ signalled a change from norm.
What is missing then is that this event takes place in the rainy season from May to December.. (although occasionally during the dry season the lightning does happen) So the “140 to 160 nights a year, 10 hours per day and up to 280 times per hour” is not actually spread throughout the year, but is limited to the months which are not January to April.
The quote obviously comes from an AGW stooge, he’s often quoted directly in other articles, even if he actually exists. Certainly not a real local who would know this.
See post 3 here: http://lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/thread.jspa?threadID=1572509
from someone who has a camp there and does tourist trips.
That wikipedia article doesn’t just need correcting, which would obliterate the propaganda bias which should be pointed out, but needs to show that a bias was posted by a deliberate sleight of hand to give the AGWmantra and by doing so, also giving the wrong information about the event. Beyond my capacity, hope someone who writes on wiki can do this.

Whoops, that’s the link for the EGU General Assembly 2010 presentation. And I have no idea how to get ahold of a copy.
Google –> Actual paper’s abstract (at paywall)
About the same wording, although here it says “We have discovered a robust indicator of this 27-day rotation…” for some reason, go figure.
Google (title of paper) –> http://www.tau.ac.il/~royyaniv/ILAN_website/solar.pdf – Actual paper. Jackpot.
As I had previously known and clarified further by additional reading about the ionosphere, signal reception degrades during the day due to solar radiation. The paper notes this 27-day periodicity was noticed in the 2-5 kHz range. Thus the effect is noted during periods of marginal reception when those frequencies are most affected.
I noticed in the paper an apparent aversion to using a decimal point. Thy were used, as in the Introduction, while mentioning the uncertainty of existing solar rotation period figures. But for the work presented in the paper, 27 as a whole number is basically it. However there is an interesting tidbit found in Figure 3. Where the vertical red line has been drawn at 27 days, the actual peak occurs after that, indicating it was slightly longer than 27 days.
Beyond that, I noticed a major problem with the paper. There is no attempt to rule out the Moon’s influence. The effect could only be detected during the day, the period of marginal reception. Therefore the nearest source of a persistent 27 day pattern, the Moon, was ignored. As recently mentioned here at WUWT, new info about the Moon’s core may mean it has a larger influence on the ionosphere than previously thought. I admit I’m not aware of hardly anything published on the Moon’s influence on the ionosphere, beyond a slight knowledge of its effect on the related magnetosphere. But this is not a gross effect being examined in this paper, but rather a small one affecting a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum, thus the possible influence of the Moon on or around this little bit may not have been previously studied.
Thus what could have been a somewhat mundane paper noting the correlation between this effect and a rock-steady lunar cycle, most likely the perigee-to-perigee anomalistic month with an average of 27.55455 days, instead proudly trumpets “…a robust indicator…” of solar rotation period, a figure that varies greatly depending on what particular area of the Sun is of interest.
Besides, how useful could this “robust” indicator be anyway? It’s a very general figure, when we already have the Sun under so much direct observation that we can derive lots of measurements of rotation periods.
Well, best of luck to Dr. Price, the acclaimed climate change scientist, and all the graduate students that he’s trained to critically analyze data as well as he does.
😉

“Created” is a misnomer just as “Global Warming” is a misnomer. Mass and Energy are neither created nor destroyed. It confuses my mind when people talk about matter and say thinks like ‘make’ or ‘create’. More altruistic words are, ‘constructed’, or ’emit’.
As for the global warming thing .. the real problem is ozone depletion. You can’t deny that our protective barrier, the ozone, is an important part of our life. It shields use from UV radiation when we are facing the sun, but it holds in our warm air when we not.

As for the global warming thing .. the real problem is ozone depletion.

Then this recent WUWT post should put your mind at ease, as ozone depletion is not a problem.New rate of stratospheric photolysis questions ozone hole
The evidence is pointing to the varying size of the “ozone hole” being natural variation that was jumped on as “proof” that “Humans did something bad!” for political and economic gain. You know, just like they’ve done with global warming.
Some may find it shocking that the amount of ozone far above the surface of the Earth is not something controlled by the whims of mankind, and depends on factors far beyond our reach. If that upsets them, tough. Just don’t let it upset you.

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